Open Source Release Welcomes Developers to Contribute and Help Solve Planet-Scale Challenges

At Microsoft, our Quantum mission is to develop and deploy the world’s most scalable, secure, quantum computing system and to support a rich ecosystem of domain experts, developers, and researchers to solve today’s most challenging problems.

To help achieve this mission we introduced the Microsoft Quantum Development Kit (QDK) eighteen months ago. The QDK includes the Q# quantum programming language and compiler, samples and tutorials to get started, and simulators and resource estimators for your quantum programs. The QDK also includes development environment extensions for VS and VS Code, and integration with the Jupyter platform. It has been exciting to see the deep community engagement with our QDK and to witness the apps that are being built to help realize a quantum future.

Although Microsoft published the Quantum Development Kit, this is really our collective QDK. It is researchers, developers, and academics such as yourself that are the key to unlocking the power of quantum computing. The collective contributions of our quantum community will drive the necessary software advances, from the algorithms that will unlock applications to the tools that will enable the optimization necessary to overcome hardware constraints, so that together we can solve planet-scale challenges.

With this in mind, we are excited to announce that starting today, we are open-sourcing the QDK so that our broader community can contribute quantum apps and algorithms as well as advancements in compilation, optimization and tooling. By open-sourcing the Quantum Development Kit in GitHub, we enable developers to contribute alongside an emerging community of quantum computing programmers to help solve some of our world’s most important challenges.

Watch the brief video below to learn more about our Open Source efforts as well as other recent improvements to the Quantum Development Kit:

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These recent updates to the QDK, ranging from our open-source efforts to our new “no install” option, are designed to make it easier than ever for you to engage with and contribute to our quantum initiatives. You can get started with the QDK by visiting our Microsoft Quantum website and can engage with our growing, passionate community of Q# users on GitHub, Stack Exchange, or Stack Overflow.